


You Can Hide Under My Bed (Revisited)

by YouCanJive



Series: Time is the Longest Distance (Between Two Places) [14]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Friendship/Love, Gen, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2020-12-14 00:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21006500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouCanJive/pseuds/YouCanJive
Summary: Tony was lying on his bed, not sprawled out as he had been every other time Darcy had seen him sleep, but on his side, curled up tightly around himself, looking impossibly small.





	1. The Bed

Darcy wasn’t allowed to meet Tony’s plane upon his return.

It took her parents and Rhodey days to get her to accept it.

Instead, she had to wait, while he got back and settled and the doctors looked him over and Rhodey could make arrangements for Darcy to visit without anybody knowing.

Her parents wanted her to wait for fall break – _The semester just started, sweetheart _– but she couldn’t.

Couldn’t even bear the thought that Tony was back and safe and home and she was supposed to just go to her classes and make small talk over coffee and the clink of dining hall dishes and pretend like everything was fine when all she wanted was to be at Tony’s side.

They had spoken on the phone and texted and he said he was fine but Darcy knew better and Tony needed her and she needed him and it was stupid for her to pretend to be paying attention in her classes when her mind was two thousand miles away.

And then Rhodey had called and said she could come that weekend, if she wanted. That he’d made arrangements and there would be no staff, that he’d keep Pepper away, that he could get her in a plane that evening.

If she wanted.

She hadn’t even bothered packing, just grabbed her keys and had been out the door, asking Rhodey what airport she should head to before he’d had enough time to ask her to think about it.

She barely processed the drive to the airport or the flight, or anything, really, until Rhodey’s arms were around her and he was ushering her into a car that would take her to Tony.

It was nighttime by the time she arrived at Tony’s but she practically ran into the house, looking around for him with more energy than she had done just about anything with over the last three months.

JARVIS quietly informed them that _Sir was finally sleeping_ in a tone that could have been reproachful and Darcy apologized and promised not to wake him even as she made her way straight to his room.

Tony was lying on his bed, not sprawled out as he had been every other time Darcy had seen him sleep, but on his side, curled up tightly around himself, looking impossibly small.

The sight of him stopped Darcy dead in her tracks, hitting her like a punch to the chest, and she had to brace herself against the wall to stay on her feet.

He was there.

She’d known he was. They had said so. Rhodey had said so. She’d seen the pictures of his return in the news.

But there was a difference between knowing and… and seeing him right there, asleep, in his bed.

There was a faint blue glow, almost like a nightlight, coming from his chest, and Rhodey had said something about his wounds and some device, but she couldn’t even try to process any of that right now.

She stepped up to the side of his bed, quiet as she could, and fell down to her knees beside him, her eyes darting all over his face, to his arms, crossed tightly and protectively around his chest, down the length of his body, curled up as it was, as if trying to memorize him or categorize every inch of him, every scrape, every slight movement. Then back to his face. And then…

Darcy had seen Tony’s soulmark before. It ran along his ribs, on the right side of his body and he always kept it covered, but he had shown it to her, once.

Now, his shirt had ridden up in his sleep and Darcy hissed at the all-too-clear curve of his ribs under his skin, bracketing the first words she'd ever said to him, forever offering him shelter.

_You can hide under my bed_

She had never touched it.

It was _intimate_, touching your soulmate’s mark.

The kind of thing rom-coms ended with, and teenage girls giggled and fantasized about.

Darcy had never touched Tony’s soulmark before, nor he hers, and she should feel wrong about doing it now, like this, while he was unconscious.

But it was not a conscious choice on her part.

After months of terror and pain and the growing fear that, even though she knew – she _knew _– that Tony was out there somewhere, she would never see him again…

She needed to know that he was back, that he was real, that this was Tony and he was her soulmate and he was alive and those were her words, indelibly inked onto his warm, very much alive, body.

So it wasn’t a choice, really, and her fingers were brushing over her words on his skin before she’d processed the movement of her arm.

In the movies and the novels, there were always fireworks when soulmates touched each other’s marks.

Fireworks and the world stopping spinning under their feet and more than a few heated looks.

But there were no fireworks for Darcy.

Just a hum under her skin where her fingers met Tony’s mark.

A hum and goosebumps and a warmth that felt like home, and Tony, and love, slowly seeping through her fingers and deep into the rest of her body, like stepping into a hot bath.

She let out a shuddering breath and was about to withdraw her hand when Tony shifted in his sleep, his muscles seeming to relax under Darcy’s touch, his arms loosening around his chest.

He was still asleep, his eyes moving aimlessly beneath his lids. Darcy bit her lip, unsure what to do, and then –

“Darcy,” he said. It was little more than a breath, his voice grainy and rough from sleep, and Darcy watched his face intently, but he was still sleeping.

She wondered if he could feel that she was there, if he could feel her touching his soulmark the same way she did, even in his sleep.

Or maybe it was just a dream, and Darcy’s heart clenched at the thought of Tony dreaming of her, of months of him calling for her in his sleep while he was being held, and hurt, and used for who knew what end.

Darcy toed off her shoes and climbed into the bed, sliding in behind Tony.

She fisted her hand in the back of his shirt, rested her forehead between his shoulder blades, and placed her right hand back over her words on his side.

With his warmth and his heartbeat and the rise and fall of his every breath against her body, and feeling their soulbond flowing endlessly around and within and between them, like a boundless ocean originating somewhere between his ribs and the palm of her hand, Darcy drifted off to sleep.


	2. The Dream

Tony snapped awake, as he had every day for the last…he didn’t even know how long.

“You are home, Sir,” JARVIS announced overhead, his voice comforting and reassuring as he slowly raised the lights in the room. “It is 5:17am, on Friday, September 12th. Would you like to hear the weather forecast for Malibu?”

Tony blinked up at the ceiling a couple times, trying to reorient himself.

He was back. He was home.

His hand instinctively came up to his chest to reach for the new miniaturized ARK reactor there, to see that it was really there, that it hadn’t all just been a dream – a nightmare.

But as he shifted his arm he suddenly noticed resistance, something pulling on the back of his shirt.

His breath caught in his chest, his heart speeding up as he braced himself to turn around, to see what was holding him in place this time.

After his dreams and plans to fly from his captors, he’d become used to nightmares of being pulled down.

In those dreams he’d been flying, certain he was free just before he was pulled back down. This dream – waking up in his bed, being home, only to be yanked back – was new.

He might hate it even more than the ones of flying.

Unlike in his dreams of Abu, or Raza, or Yinsen’s corpse, or, as had been the case in one particularly strange version of this nightmare, a laughing Obie, grasping on and pulling him down, down, down towards the sand and the cave and the pain, however, there was no feeling of falling here. No cave. No screams. No waking and pain and the realization this was all a dream.

Nothing, in short, to make him think it _was_ a dream aside from what, now that he felt more awake, felt very much like the gentle pressure of somebody or something holding on to the back of his shirt.

Heart racing, Tony shifted his weight and looked over his shoulder.

Her face was half-covered by the ever-present unruly mass of curls that Tony would have recognized anywhere.

Darcy.

Still-in-her-street-clothes, asleep-in-his-bed, hand-tightly-fisted-in-the-back-of-his-shirt _Darcy_.

The adrenaline seemed to vanish from his body as Tony collapsed back down.

She did not let go of his shirt, even in her sleep, so it twisted and pulled across his chest as he shifted to be able to look directly at her.

He was home, and Darcy was here, and he felt the very frustrating urge to cry.

He brushed some of the stray hairs away from her face with a shaking hand, desperate to see her face.

He was home, and Darcy was here, and if this was a dream, he did not want to wake up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Real life has been BANANAS the last 10 days. I do sincerely apologize for the delay.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still having a really hard time getting into Tony's head while in Afghanistan or even after it, so we're back to Darcy. There's a bit of Tony in the second chapter to this, but I think I'm going to end up doing Iron Man just form the perspective of Darcy and Rhodey, because otherwise it might take ages to write it. And you all know, more or less, how Tony's story goes.  
Writing a series of snapshots, instead of a continuous story, means I can always come back to write Tony's side if/when I feel I can do it properly, so don't despair.  
In the meantime, please let me know what you think!


End file.
